María Elena García Autino

From Discourse-3

“What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”

– Lewis Carroll

Alice through the Looking Glass

It sounded like, when retiring after completing a wide and extensive professional experience of more than thirty years as a teacher and professor, I would have been ready to choose some quiet corner according to age and situation.

But among many things, I have been a constant reader of Lewis Carroll and strongly believe that “the more head- downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”

Choosing a dynamic and amused way of life, I still enjoy looking through the viewfinder of the splendid kaleidoscope that life is.

I have taught letters, literature, logic, philosophy, and basic computer science. Now after retiring, I accepted the incredible challenge to travel around Argentina, showing children and their teachers how to build kites, with Subite al Colectivo [1], a program by the Ministry of Education that assures the access of all to the many diverse manifestations of the culture.

I learned how to build kites from Barriletes a Toda Costa (BaToCo) [2], or, I shall say, I keep on learning every day from this fantastic group of friends to which I belong. BaToCo is a non-profit corporation that, by means of workshops, exhibits and web activities, organizes many different cultural and educational events related to building and flying kites. It promotes the activity at schools, hospitals, special institutions for the old and disabled, and remote or isolate villages such as the ones I visit.

And so I am not alone. During the trips, I have permanent assistance from the organization, and I also travel with a group of young artists that integrates disciplines such as acrobatics, film making, comedy, pantomime, and many others – including kite making, of course.

Thousands of youngsters, their teachers, and families share an incredible experience coordinated by these educational and professional artists. Usually they are very young teachers or students in their last years of college. I feel really honored to have been invited to share the trip and enjoy this unique opportunity, learning a lot from them, and quite often feeling like I am twenty years old again!

I accepted the challenge and I travel along with a few basic and easy to build kite models [3] that the children around the country transform and modify permanently, creating absolutely unexpected, unusual, and unpublished models. We pay special attention to encourage the process of recovering scrap or waste plastics and reprocessing the material into kites.

It is not easy to describe the reaction of children that have never seen a kite before, or that the only one they know is the old traditional model their elders have been building for years. All of a sudden, they found themselves exploring new sizes, colors, shapes, and materials, facing, proving, and often defying quite different winds.

Although I constantly propose new experiences, I encourage children to build their own traditional models using classic elements from their surroundings and take advantage of plastic pieces that are habitually discarded around the landscape. I visited little villages of very poor and extreme life conditions, sometimes with lack of water, hard winds, desert conditions, like El Totoral, La Rioja or Iglesia, San Juan. I found everywhere the same enthusiastic attitude towards building kites.

After they paid careful attention to my lesson, kids from a little school on Iglesia were worried and busy looking for materials that would ensure them the possibility to keep on building kites after I left their village.

In more sophisticated communities, “city kites” were challenged by local models on thread fights not easy to win.

I still remember the fantastic race of professor Ana Maria Pagani and her students in Angaco, a very small San Juan village. These were their first kites and so they ran desperately to raise them, defying the almost total lack of wind. They elevated the kites to a zone where there was more wind and they raised. Nobody could believe it.

In Tama, La Rioja, a very isolated zone where almost everything is lacking, with precarious houses, a water shortage, and lack of transportation, the children have little access to artistic and cultural experiences. It was very moving to listen to a boy who, sighing with force, said spontaneously to himself, “Ay, y pa cuándo hay de volver ustedes (and who knows when you shall return)…” Beautiful indeed–but sad, because it will take a long time for us to come back.

To travel all over the country building kites with the children was a way to discover their problems and difficulties, but also their hopes for a better quality of life.

It was a magnificent opportunity to offer information on new designs, materials, forms, and techniques of construction and flight to them. This unique approach to their traditional ways to construct and fly kites allowed me to know better their families and communities, to listen to their stories, to understand and include their myths and legends. Many of the children and young people who participated in the program shared their new knowledge with their brothers or neighbors.

I did not take the account of how many kites were constructed throughout this ongoing experience, but an approximate calculation is around 1200 kites in 2008.

Each one special, each one reflecting the creativity and the enthusiasm of its author. And their smiles.

[1] Subite al Colectivo: www.me.gov.ar/curriform/subite.html

1. Barriletes a Toda Costa: www.batoco.org
2. Kite model: www.akg.cwc.net/so%20you%20want%20to%20make%20a%20kite.htm